Day 1 - Wednesday (Arrival)
- Our flight was at 8, so we had to leave the house by 6, at the latest. We left right at 6, which was okay but didn't give us much cushion . We get 15 minutes away when J realizes he left his wedding ring in the house. He turns around to get it, and then drives like a crazy maniac to get us to the airport on time. Traffic was light, so we got there right on time, but only had a few minutes to grab a few bites of food before we left for the first leg of the journey.
- We were supposed to have an hour long layover in Dallas, where there had been some crazy storm in the morning (I heard it was hailing, but when we got there, it was sunny and dry out. We think they made the storm up). It backed up all the traffic at the airport, so by the time we actually landed, we had about 10 minutes until our next flight. And as it turned out, the other terminal was so far away it took a train to get there. In a sweaty panic with 1 minute to spare and no idea where the train was, I stopped an employee to ask what would happen if we didn't make it (how many flights to Puerto Rico can there be in one day?) He actually found us a flight that left in 3 hours, and reserved us a spot just in case we needed it. However, so many people were late that they held the plane, so we made the flight. We did not have time to get lunch. (Luckily, they sell lunches on planes now, for about the cost of an arm and a leg. We sacrificed a leg and got a sandwich to share).
- A very nice man moved seats with us on the flight so that J and I could sit by each other. He volunteered to give up his aisle seat for my middle seat (which NOBODY in their right mind would prefer) and I just thought that was such a nice gesture that he should get a whole bullet point to himself ;)
- We landed safely and went to get our luggage. Our friends were outside in the heat and humidity waiting to take us to the hotel (nobody is allowed in the baggage claim area). Our luggage doesn't arrive. We stand in a very long line (there's only one employee - in all fairness, it is about 9 PM on a Wed now) just to find out that our luggage got put on the other flight from Dallas, and since we've already waited so long, it should be there in an hour. We all go across the street (to Buffalo Wild Wings!) to eat, listen to some very bad rock cover group, and then get the luggage.
- Raz and Betsy (the bride and groom) take us to the resort we are staying at, The Rio Mar (don't trust the website, it doesn't really look like that). The resort is nice (well, it's pretty darned late at this point so we can't see much outside, but the interior is okay. Nothing to write home about) but they don't start off too great - we'd made the reservation about 8 months earlier, and they somehow weren't able to get us a room with a king sized bed (nothing says, "let's pretend we're on a real honeymoon this time!" like a room with two queen sized beds! Actually, that is what we had on our wedding night when they messed up our reservation, so I just kept thinking maybe the resort would take care of us the next day) and our room smelled. We never figured out what it smelled like, and you'd get used to it after being in the room for a bit, but every time you'd come back, it'd hit you again. Also, I'm convinced the thermostat was just a decoration - no matter what button you pushed, nothing changed. It was warm in the day and FREEZING in the evening! All in all, it was a room like you'd have in a (broken) Holiday Inn, or any other generic hotel in the US. Not what I thought a "resort" room would look like.
- Rain! Lots of it. Not how we thought vacation would start (apparently rain at this time of you is really unusual. Of course it is, what luck!)
- After a leisurely lunch and wandering around the inside of the resort we got dressed up and met with the bride and groom to prepare for shenanigans! The boys went down to where there is a strip of clubs and bars in San Juan and got a hotel room down there for the night. The girls did a lot of getting lost when driving and waiting for people to show up, but then spent most of the night at what is apparently the hottest club in Puerto Rico (at the moment anyhow), where I pondered how short girls liked to wear their skirts and wondered why, if the dance club was so awesome, the dance floor was divided like a junior high dance (with all the boys on one side and the girls on the other. It was the oddest thing I've ever seen a bunch of grown adults do).
- We slept in a bit and then headed off to one of those timeshare presentations, which we'd been assured would be fine to attend even if we didn't intend to purchase anything. WRONG! After an exceptionally long presentation (the girl was new and it took longer than they said it would) we got yelled at by the sales manager for wasting their time when we said we weren't in the market to spend money on anything today but still wanted to know the price of what they were offering. (She said we had to "earn" the right to know, disputed J's claim that when you purchase a car they tell you what the price is, and told us to never attend timeshare presentations because they spent a lot of money on marketing and we were wasting it and using them for the wrong reasons. I wrote the sales manager a bad review and was in a REALLY bad mood for the next few hours. But, we did get a $75 credit for anything we purchased at the resort (which was good, because all the food there was super expensive!)
- We had a rental car in order to drive the groom to the wedding next day, so we decided to go out to dinner for some actual Puerto Rican food (imagine that, wanting to try something other than burgers and fries!) We had some mofongo, which looked weird but tasted good (and I was proud of myself for trying something new!) and then got a call from the groom needing help. He was supposed to stay the night at the resort with his best man, but nobody could give him a ride over. We came to the rescue, and then decided to go on a trial run to find the church so we'd know what time to leave at the next morning. GOOD CALL, because the church was in the middle of nowhere, the directions we were given were originally in Spanish, and since Puerto Rico has few (if any!) street signs, we were supposed to navigate by landmarks (hard to do in the dark). We couldn't find it to save our lives! The bride and her sister had to drive over and lead us to the church, and we wrote our own directions for the next day ;)
- Then we had another set-back - the room the best man had rented had some plumbing issues and his kid was sick, so the groom couldn't stay there. Remember that we had that room with two beds in it . . . ? So the groom stayed the night with us, which wasn't the end of the world, but was made difficult by the fact that both he and J decided to snore in tandem that night, and I had to sleep in sweat pants (I HATE sleeping in pants!) Add to that the fact that the thermostat had an identity crisis and it ended up not turning the AC on all night . . . . I did NOT sleep well! ;)
- We all woke up early and I tell you, watching the groom get all primped and ready was one of the cutest things I've ever seen. I have a picture of J and Raz standing at the sink shaving together (using my Raspberry Rain shower gel) that I ADORE, because how often do you see a man get ready for his wedding? There's usually only photos of the bride getting prepared. However, J is in his underpants in the photo, so I figure it's not safe to post online ;)
- Knowing where the church was, we left with enough time to get us there by 8 AM (the wedding was supposed to be at 8:30) when the bride's dad was going to arrive to open up the gates and doors into the church. By 8:20, the only other people waiting outside the gates are the best man and his wife. Long story short, I think this was an example of different cultures having different expectations of timeliness ;) Dad showed up to open the church at 8:30, and up until about 9:15, we were pretty much the only people there. Turned out there was an issue with the hairdresser and a bunch of guests got lost, but the bride and guests arrived and the wedding did take place, it all just started an hour later than anticipated :)
- The reception was a brunch outside under a gazebo - very beautiful, very yummy, very humid ;) How the bride managed it without looking like a wet dog, I'll never know!
- After the reception J and I took a short nap, and then got down to the belated honeymoon part of our trip! I'd been feeling rather resentful at not getting to spend much time with him, so this was really the kick-start of the "us" part of the trip. We walked along the beach and poked at coconuts and shells, got a table at a casual restaurant facing the ocean, and ate hamburgers and sipped rum drinks (oh my gosh, THAT is what a mojito is supposed to taste like?? DELICIOUS!) as the sun went down. Lovely!
- What would a trip to a tropical island be without some time in the sun? The weather was gorgeous, so this was the day to do it! Here's the problem - J is WHITE white white. He skin burns from just the WORD "sun". So we both slathered up from head to toe in SPF 50, clear zinc oxide on the face, and hats. Then we found the shady area of the pool and hung out there. We went in the ocean once, hit a volleyball around in the pool for a little bit, and called it quits after maybe 2 hours. Even after all our precautions, J (of course!) got burned! It was really mild, but what still makes me laugh is that he managed to burn everything except his pecs. It looked like he put his hands over his nipples and laid out in the sun for too long ;) I have no idea how that happened, but I still laugh when I think about it ;) We also had some crazy encounters with iguanas, but I will have a separate, photo-intensive post with more details about that.
- That night we had an expensive dinner at one of the nice restaurants at the resort. It wasn't anything special, but it was romantic and fun :)
- The one thing EVERYONE we talked to kept telling us to do while we were in Puerto Rico was go visit El Yunque (which is Spanish, so of course it's pronounced "yoon-kay", though the way the locals say it, it sounds more like, "june-kay". So of course, J and I started calling it "El Junky"). El Yunque is the rainforest that was right next to the resort, and that the area is famous for. We decided to rent a car so that we could see the rainforest that day, and then drive ourselves to the airport the next day (instead of paying $37.50/person for a shuttle ride there, what a rip-off!)
- Everyone had continually told us how close the rainforest was to our resort, so we just headed out to the main road and thought we'd see signs telling us how to get there. Well, between the few number of street signs we'd seen, the tiny map of the area we had, and Google maps on my phone, we managed to figure out a very round-about way to get to the middle of the rainforest. We drove and drove and drove and ended up at . . . . a dead end! We drove all the way up the back of the mountain only to find that the small road we were counting on was closed. So, we backtracked all the way back to the resort, still confused as to how to GET onto the great bit mountain that we could clearly see no matter where we went!
- At the street leading back to the resort, we finally saw a sign for El Yunque. Apparently, the entrance to the rain forest is across the main street from the resort (of course the only sign we ever saw was from the main road as we were driving, why would they want to make it easy for tourists at the resort to find the biggest tourist area on the island??)
- Our adventures at El Yunque were probably the highlight of our trip (for me, anyhow) but those stories will also follow (eventually!) in a more photo-intensive post.
- We were super sweaty when we finished, so we went back to the resort, showered, and headed out for our last dinner on the island. We ended up at a shopping mall, ate Chinese food in the food court, and went to see a movie (it was only $5.75, another highlight of our trip as far as I'm concerned!)
- Our flight wasn't until the afternoon, so we checked out in the morning (and saw how much money they charged us each day in "resort fees". What a rip-off! We didn't ever look at the free newspapers or use the lounge chairs or cabanas by the pool, we stayed in our rooms when we weren't eating in their restaurants, and we had to pay for that separately!) got in the car, and headed off downtown!
- We met up with Raz and Betsy for lunch and ended up getting a parking ticket because we parked in the Burger King parking lot but didn't eat there (though in our own defense, we had PLANNED to eat there but then got side tracked by a pizza place. And how do they know we didn't eat there anyhow? Did they go inside and ask around? And who makes parking tickets without any English instructions on them, if it's such a tourist area? There isn't any address listed, so I can't pay the darned thing, even if I wanted to!) then dropped off the rental car, got onto our flight, made all of our connecting flights, and got home really late at night, but totally safe and sound :)
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